Browning letter 2002

Jan. 20, 2002

Dear Dennis,

The 1960 Newsletter that arrived last week prompts me to offer some thoughts on the peculiar political skew found within most humanities and social sciences faculties today. My observations are based on more than thirty-four years of association with Kenyon College, all of them as a faculty member, eight as provost, and six months as acting president. My own politics have always been conservative (which generally translates into Republican), and so, as you might imagine, I've given lots of thought to the issue that really ought to be paramount wherever authentic diversity is an institutional goal; why are conservative-thinking faculty members so scarce in humanities and social science departments? Here are some thoughts on the matter.

First off, it's important to realize that although academic talent is found among students across the full range of the ideological spectrum, students on the left are likelier -- and I think far likelier -- than students on the right to pursue a Ph.D. with the goal of teaching. Some students on the right find the prospect of joining a left-liberal teaching establishment off-putting; others, being likelier than their left-liberal friends to have a Hobbesian/Calvinist view of human nature, see law or business as more interesting career options; still others, their skepticism honed by four years of in-class sparring with left-liberal faculty, wind up dubious about the integrity of the humanities and social sciences. But whatever the reason, the bottom line remains the same; the shortage of Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences results in part from the paucity of conservatives entering graduate programs.

Still, one might wonder: why don't some academics change their political views as time passes? After all, in most professions it is not an unusual thing for persons to shift their political thinking. Why isn't the same phenomenon found in college and university faculties? At least three forces make such shifts uncommon.

First, there is the simple power of group-think. Few of us gladly choose to break from the patterns of thought that have in very real ways defined the communities we belong to. Left-liberal thinking is a conventional trait of academic communities, and academics, like most other people, are reluctant to violate community norms, shock their colleagues, and risk becoming eccentrics or even outcasts.

Second, academics are more insulated from the pressures of the market than most professionals, and hence they misunderstand it. They live, for example, in a community in which the chief determinant of salary is length of service, not the quality of job performance. They work, moreover, for institutions that have, as American institutions go, astonishingly long histories [quick: name a respected institution of higher learning founded since World War II], and so they tend to assume that maintaining institutional continuity and health in a society that is steadily undergoing change is not a very challenging task. As a consequence of this judgment, they vastly undervalue the importance of leadership, practical imagination, and entrepreneurialism.

Third, academics in the humanities and social sciences rarely need to confront anything like a chastening reality. They generate and debate interesting theories, and these theories animate their disciplines, but experience rarely pronounces a theory wrong. Instead, theories fall into and out of fashion. For the social sciences that are closest to the natural sciences this generalization would require some modification, I admit, but for disciplines like history, literature, philosophy, political theory, American studies, and so on, reality is simply not a constraint. (Which is why, in these disciplines, the notion that reality is a social construction is so widely credited.) And if reality never intrudes to require people to reconsider their intellectual baggage, they rarely have cause to change their most fundamental professional views. This is the basic reason that faculty members in the humanities can often get away with professing foolishness while scientists, who cannot ignore the intransigence of an external reality, rarely can.

If these points are right, they suggest that the left-liberal academic dominance in the humanities and social sciences is likely to endure. The problem, that is, is not rooted in the influence of some shadowy left-liberal conspiracy. (If only it were! Then many faculties could be shamed into behaving more responsibly.) Rather, the problem has structural foundations. For if academics are unlikely to change their minds, if there aren't all that many young conservatives in the Ph.D. pipeline anyway, and if it's hard to figure out how any college interested in adjusting its hiring procedures in order to practice intellectual affirmative action would go about identifying conservatives ("who did you vote for in the last election?" is hardly an appropriate interview question), then shifts in the political complexion of college faculties are likely to be slow in occurring.

What might that mean? In some ways, it's easy to exaggerate the deleterious consequences of the problem. For example: contrary to what one sometimes reads, left-liberal faculty (so my Kenyon experience teaches me) rarely engage in tendentious teaching. Most faculty members know and respect the difference between responsible and irresponsible teaching. Besides, a lot of all subject matters, even in the humanities and social sciences, is not readily reducible to ideological terms. But in other ways the consequences are disturbing. First, faculty members usually have wide influence on the choice of outside speakers who will be invited to campuses, and they prefer to bring in speakers whose views resonate with their won. That's why, on most campuses, the array of outside lecturers is tilted strongly to the left-liberal position. [Two notes: 1) in my experience at Kenyon, both Linda Chavez and Thomas Sowell were prevented from appearing because some faculty members disapproved of their politics; and 2) conservative faculty members are likelier -- I'm tempted to say far likelier -- than left-liberal faculty members to rejoice in an authentic diversity of expressed opinion.] Second, students are fully aware of the political complexion of their faculty, and some of them, respecting their teachers and then positing a causal relationship where none exists, come to believe that intelligent analysis leads naturally to the adoption of left-liberal views. Third, the problem seems to become more pronounced the higher up the academic pecking order you go, so that whereas Kenyon has a modest proportion of conservative academics, Harvard (and I suspect, Dartmouth) has much smaller proportion. (I think that this situation is a consequence of most of the points I've already mentioned, compounded by the additional fact that the most prestigious institutions hire academic veterans who boast significant publishing records - persons, that is, whose, political views, inextricably entangled with their disciplinary expertises, are already matters of public record.) The effect is that the nation's flagship institutions are even less representative of -- and more misleading about -- the country at large than the already unrepresentative and misleading average college or university.

These are some reflections from a conservative inside academe. Please use this letter however you wish - and that includes dishing it. It has been a sort of dry-run for a talk or essay I might prepare, and I've had fun constructing it.

Sincerely,

Reed Browning
Department of History
Seitz House
Gambier, OH 43022-9623
Tel. 740-427-5316/5762